I am working towards a similar goal, now. Through lucid dreaming I'll have the power to do anything I want. Whether or not it's as real as waking life, we'll have to wait and see. I've had lucid dreams in the past but I can't remember how real they seemed.

1) You already have the ability with practise. 2) They are as real as your experiences in life as you are most likely, and hopefully still alive while you're dreaming. Dreaming seems to fulfill extremely important roles in our individual psychological health and even though we spend a third to one half of our lives sleeping and dreaming it is too often marginalized as not real or consequential. I feel if we paid as much attention to our dreams as we do to diet and grooming we'd be healthier and more wholistic, more complete.

Coming to a state of lucidity in dreams is not unlike coming to a state of "in the moment" serenity in waking life... becoming the engaged observer of one's own existence is what it's all about, so of course we would all want to control our dreams. The key to this is the unconscious mind, since it's the one putting on the show. Every show or conception of reality tells us something, signs are messages and what they mean to us reflects things our unconscious is trying to communicate. If our egos were able to control our dreams then our unconscious selves would have to erupt during waking life, which is never a good idea. Through meditation and lucid dreaming we can open the communication channel between our conscious and unconscious, get the dialog going, and as a result our dreams become more harmonious and in accord with our waking.

One day you can even reach a spot where your dreams and waking life meet and become identitcal. This happened to me once during a profound bout of fever combined with deep trance meditation -- I saw the exact same vision with my eyes closed or open. The two-dimensional otherness of dream perception had bled into my waking reality and vice versa and there was no longer a difference. Crazy, daddio! My point is this: we use 10% of our brains during waking life, thus dreams are the other 90% (or less) trying to communicate with us, to lead us forward via messages, to face fears, overcome obstacles and so forth... when we finally pass enough obstacles, challenge and absorb enough demons, embrace the evil self and free it to the heavens, then we finally meeet this other, this alter-ego self who creates the dreams, this aspect of ourselves is sometimes mistaken for god, but that's a bad mistake, since it's way too tricky to trust fully. chances are it's a little annoyed with you for not coming to visit sooner. It's like your true love waiting in the Rapunzel tower to let down her hair, and you're 1000 years late.

i've done this control a dream,,,,,i put my arms up like an antenna...maybe in an H pattern...(a cheer-leader H)....then lie there...thinking....if i could only fly...??????....maybe it wasthe overdose of sleeping pills...but i've done that...to do that everyday...i would be so light andweak it wouldn't be funny...in factno i would hate it.....

bdleaf's comment is interesting. One method of choosing dreams, (that seems to work, more often than not), entails choosing the subject of your dreaming before you retire and then repeating the subject of the desired dream like a mantra as you go to sleep thus carrying your desire from one of your landscapes into another.

bdleaf's other concern is: "My only fear is that I'd live for my dreams and not for my life" This is a standard and valid fear. We all want to have a balance between our conscious and subconscious states of existence. Being caught totally in either place always, would be a kind of blindness or death. Most of us choose to work for more consciousness because it enables us to cope with survival in the external world. Thus we tend to neglect the internal world at the expense of spiritual and mental health. This is one reason many cultures have a reverential place for Shamans who carry the concerns of the "mostly conscious" majority of tribal members, into the realm of the subconscious. Shaman's do this by choosing to consciouslydiminish their conscious connection with the external to a thread, risking death, in order to travel to subconsciousness and return to consciousness with reports and reassurances from the "beyond".

It's an interesting question. Personally after I gained the ability to be aware of when I'm dreaming I stopped dreaming (or remembering them) at all, which I think of more natural and relaxing than trying to take control over your dreams. But a power where the dream world would be as real as the other one? It'd be an interesting power, though I already have enough responsibilities 16/24, I'm glad I don't have to account for the remaining 8.

As a few other have stated, I also already have this ability. I have been able to lucidly dream since I was around four years old. Anything that I have experienced in the past (hang gliding, eating apple pie, looking out from the highest point of the Eiffel Tower) I can do whenever I please...plus I can combine the elements as I see fit (I could climb the Tower like a rock climber, eat the best apple pie I've ever tasted, and then jump off and fly away). I also allow myself to "freedream", which is where I allow a portion of my subconsious to dream without my total control, but I am still 100% able to control my first-person "avatar" as I choose.

i haven't had an actual dream since i was a child. sometimes when i wake up extremely slow i can remember the dream for a minute, but after my mind is awake and active in the real world i can only remember remembering the dream. i would have to focus on retaining my dreams before i worried about achieving lucid dreaming. would anyone happen to know a technique that would allow me to dream again?

I believe we all have this power, although the distractions of daily life make it difficult to focus on accomplishing this feat to the maximum. Its fascinating how dreams are like islands of consciousness within a sea of absolute nothing. Suddenly we become immersed in a reality similar to ours in a waking state but closer to that which is sublime or infinite.

dude ive had only ONE lucid dream (but didnt know i could control). i wont go into details about WHAT i dreamt but it was sooo weird that i knew i was dreaming. but later it started to seem real so i began questioning if it was a dream. i GOT to learn how to control when/what i dream. dont you hate when you have a dream that defies MANY laws of physics and you have no thought that you could be dreaming? or what about if your doing something in a dream (maybe an adventure?) and you know exactly what/where something is but when you awaken you have no clue how you knew it or have no knowledge of what you knew in your dream? example: i knew how to get to this one place IN my dream but upon waking i noticed i never knew this place (even if it didnt exist) i don't know about you guys but i get that a LOT in my dreams and its WEIRD. but a good kind of weird.